금융체제, 기업지배구조, 그리고 고용체제:한국과 일본의 비교

According to the‘ varieties of capitalism’theory, the production regimes of Korea and Japan have a commonality of ‘coordinated market economies’(CMEs). This study challenges this conventional argument to emphasize the similarity between Korean and Japanese production regimes, highlighting different paths of the evolution of employment systems in two countries since the 1990s. In Japan, the lifetime employment system which is one of the major characteristics of CMEs has shown a significant continuity even after the economic crisis of the 1990s. It can be explained by the Japanese employers’ strategy to protect employment, which derived from the sustainability of the main bank system as a corporate financing and governance system in spite of its partial erosion. On the contrary, the instability of employment in Korea has been dramatically increased because of the firms’heavy reliance on numerical flexibility. The motives of numerical flexibilization have much accelerated by the combined effects of the labor-exclusive Chaebol system and market-based financial system in the era of global competition. As a result, the Korean production regime has been shifted towards a liberal market economy(LME). On the basis of a comparative study, this paper shows the different logics of firms’ employment strategies between the CME and LME models.